Marie Darrieussecq

Marie Darrieussecq (born 3 January 1969, Bayonne) is a French writer.

She is also a translator, and has practised as a psychoanalyst.

Her books explore the unspoken and abandoned territories in literature.

Her work is dense, marked by a constant renewal of genres and registers.

She is published by the French publisher P.O.L.

Her first book, Truismes (Pig Tales), published at the age of 27, the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow, was a worldwide success, with a circulation of more than one million copies in France and abroad, translated into forty languages.

In 1986, she passed the Baccalauréat in French Literature in Bayonne.

After a two-year preparatory course (Hypokhâgne and Khâgne) in literature at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux and the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris, she studied at the École Normale Supérieure de la Rue d'Ulm in Paris from 1990 to 1994, followed by the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

In 1992, she passed her aggregation in Modern Literature, coming sixth.

Her doctoral thesis under the direction of Francis Marmande, defended in 1997 at the Université Paris VII, was entitled: "Critical Moments in Contemporary Literature. Tragic Irony and Autofiction in the Works of Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky and Hervé Guibert."

Her first husband was a mathematician and her second is an astrophysicist.

Darrieussecq has three children.

Darrieussecq locates her work in the realm of fiction and qualifies The Baby as her "only autobiographical book."

Almost all her characters are women, and most of them are narrators.

They write, mostly in notebooks, in order to bear witness to events and to survive.

Although they seem to resemble the author by their profession (several are psychologists), they are never completely like her.

For example, not one of them is an author.

She either writes short monologues or novels in the third person that focus on the world as a whole, through a group of people from a fictive village called Clèves in south-west France, in the Basque country: "“I called this fictive, autobiographical village Clèves as a tribute to the Princesse de Clèves. I had had enough of inventing characters. Now I draw them from the reservoir of Clèves, and watch them grow older, from the 80s till much later. Solange, Rose, Christian, etc. (…) There is often an important theme, imposed by what’s happening in the world. I recently wanted to write about the migrants, like everybody else… But in my own way, far from clichés and pre-digested sentences.”"Pig Tales and My Phantom Husband can be read as two early novels that announce the total body of her work: she writes about the body and its metamorphosis, overflow and loss, with an unprecedented approach to feminine issues, while resorting to the fantastic, ghosts and monsters.

Monsters play an important role in Darrieussecq's poetics: she conceives writing as being "available to phantoms," a way of making absence present, making the reader hear the inaudible, and considering, in metaphysical cycles, the encounter between the origin of life and the silence of death.

This leads to a dense body of work that unfolds in time and leaves room for experimentation.

Darrieussecq has published eighteen novels, a play, a biography, two children's books and several artists’ catalogues.

She works on clichés and structures her novels around commonplaces.

The journalist Raphaëlle Leyris wrote in 2011: "“Marie Darrieussecq’s subject has always been same since Pig Tales: examining what language has to say about experience, the way words, namely commonplaces, express reality and, in return, shape reality.”"The title Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Men. A Novel of Cinema and Desire) was taken from a sentence by Marguerite Duras in La Vie matérielle: "We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible, we couldn’t bear them. "

As a writer of the metamorphic body, she is interested in mutation, the feminine, the masculine and the non-binary.

The body's relationship to excess and deficiency, outrageousness and disappearance, is a major theme in her work.

She says she writes: "for the body and towards the body, within the meaning of what doesn’t speak inside us. " Ghosts wander through all her books, the disappearance of a man, a child or a world.

Darrieussecq explores zones of silence and the unsaid: "Putting words on what has no words, where words do not yet exist, or do not exist anymore. "

Her characters are generally well travelled and move between Antarctica (White), Australia (Tom Is Dead), Los Angeles and The Congo (Men) and the Mediterranean on a cruise ship (La Mer à l’envers).

She associates psychology and history in her novels with different forms of geography.

Nathalie Crom, in an article on her novel Le Pays in La Croix, wrote that she raises "the question of belonging (to a language, a landscape, or a nation), without the slightest nostalgia for a classical or traditional vision of taking root. "

She pays special attention to geography in its relationship with space as well as time, and the Anthropocene Era, conscious that the planet has a limited lifespan.

Wild animals and endangered species abound.

Darrieussecq makes Gilles Deleuze's assertion her own: "Writers are responsible for dying animals. " She writes for and in the place of disappearing animals.

In an interview with the journalist Mia Funk, she declared: "When the last elephant has disappeared, we will miss him. We miss the Tasmanian tiger. "

In 2013, she was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Men, A Novel of Cinema & Desire).

In 2013, she wrote in a chronicle in the newspaper Libération: "We don’t know what will remain of us, once we live on a planet without wild animals. When what is missed is missed to the extent that its name is no longer known, even the hollow form can no longer be felt, and we lose a part of ourselves, we become more stupid, compact and less labile. Less animal, one could say. "

In Pig Tales, she relates the metaphor of a "monstrous form of puberty" through the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow.

Darrieussecq introduces babies into literature with The Baby, a book she qualifies as a "militant literary gesture."

In Clèves, she describes the transformation of a teenage girl with the arrival of her first period and her discovery of sexuality.

In 2019, she held the biannual Writer-in-Residence's Chair at Sciences Po in Paris.